ranzware
Someone deep in the bowels of the internet once betwittered that Dark Souls was “the My Summer Car of RPGs”. The joke stuck with me enough to try the car mechanic sim when it was released into early access back in 2016. I didn’t know it would take another nine years to bring this ambitiously hostile Finnish life simulator to a full release. But here it is. If you want a deeply confounding game about putting an old banger together piece by excruciating piece, while periodically sweating the grime off your body in a cramped sauna, then I can think of no better time waster. My Summer Car 1.0 came out yesterday, and a new trailer came with it.
It’s a wonderfully leery game. You have a button to piss, and another button dedicated to giving people the middle finger. You can get into rally races and mess up everything in the car you’ve spent the last few hours fixing. If you are emotionally broken and fall instantly in love with games that do not care about you as a person, then you will probably be head-over-heels for this.
Yet it is at least slightly more forgiving compared to its original release. You start with more food than a single pack of sausages, for example, and car parts no longer wear down over time but last forever. There’s also a bus to prevent you getting stranded in the middle of nowhere when you run out of fuel – something that happened to me at least once in early access.
Other stuff has changed. There’s a stress meter now, a moped to drive, and many new neighbours, farms, and factories to visit throughout the map. This includes at least one dude who’ll gamble with you over a card game. I’m getting all this from a handy video which lists all the differences, great and small. I haven’t actually played the latest version. I am too afraid. Reviewing this scrappy monster is a task I both dread and crave.
Developers AmisTech Games once quietly mentioned plans for a snowy sequel called My Winter Car. Getting the battered old summer beaut out the door was the priority, but the dev has recently confirmed in an update post that the sequel is still in “active development”. If you’re really impatient, there’s a wintry mod that jumped the gun, adding snowy weather and other cold elements to the game.
If you’re still wondering if this sim is as unusual as it seems from that trailer, you can get a taste of its bleak wackiness from various patch notes over the last nine years. Here are some of the best:
- You might now die from urinating into wrong places
- Grandma might now want to get a ride to the church
- Grandma now pays less if you have a prison tattoo
- If Player passes out from drunkenness while having active Jail sentence he is transported back to Jail
- Added TV to Jail
- Cousin might now end up as your cellmate
- Hangover is now best to be dealt with drinking alcohol
- Jumping up from lowest crouch position is now an exercise method
- Added lottery
- Urine now accumulates if player keeps urinating on the house floor
- Added Teletext to TV, use remote control to operate
- You can now grill food on top of a hot Satsuma engine
- Moose meat can be eaten after it has been grilled, similarly to fish
And if you’re still not convinced, marvel at the developer’s website. It is a thing of horrific beauty.
Kurt Indovina
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